Grand old Gaffer enters his golden age

The Ashes: Grudging respect has at last turned into genuine affection as Stewart keeps clocking up the milestones

Stephen Brenkley
Saturday 02 November 2002 20:00 EST
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Alec Stewart is not the player he used to be. For a decade, he was the hard-nosed, clean-cut, model professional who commanded respect but not reverence. No longer. Stewart is now a national treasure.

Age and durability are usually sufficient to attain this rarefied status but Stewart clinched it with another qualification. He came back. At 39, when his England place had gone to a fellow young enough to be his son and the captain had personally dictated references for the knacker's yard, the selectors recalled him.

Stewart the faithful retainer became Our Alec. On Thursday, Our Alec embarks on his seventh quest for the Ashes. If England and Stewart could somehow win, it would be the pinnacle, if not the conclusion, to the career of a man who has habitually worn his pride on one sleeve and his patriotism on the other.

"The way I've been written about has been different," he said. "I don't think I've changed, I am how I am. It may be the way the media paints a picture, seeing you play without knowing the individual underneath, it may be that age is a factor, the fact that I've played 100 Test matches and gone past Graham Gooch's appearance record, or that I was missing last winter and then came back when they said there was no coming back. That's been a little bit of a fairy tale, I suppose."

Perhaps the view of Stewart began to change in 2000 when he scored a century in his hundredth Test match on the Queen Mother's 100th birthday. The crowd at Old Trafford gave him a long, standing ovation. Now it is as if he is the Queen Mother of cricket, 122 Tests, 155 one-dayers and still better dressed than a Jermyn Street shop dummy.

"I can't tell you when I'm going to retire," he said. "I love the game and I have a huge drive to be successful, I definitely want to play these next 12 months. I set goals. Two years prior to the Aussies coming to England in 2001 I set myself the target of being involved, and after that it was this Ashes series. Now it's next summer. The goals just get shorter, that's all. But I've still got something to prove and the age thing doesn't matter."

It has been a prickly pilgrimage. Stewart did not win his first cap until he was nearly 27 and then was snidely referred to as Mickey's Lad, his dad being the England manager at the time. The son also rises, they said. He overcame that nonsense and then had to put up with nonsense from the selectors, who could never decide whether he was a specialist opening batsman, or a wicketkeeper-cum- middle-order batsman. When he was captain as well, that really threw them.

The captaincy presented further difficulties. He was sacked after England's pitiful performance in the 1999 World Cup, before which he had acted virtually as the players' shop steward in wage negotiations. Then there came the sensational, unfounded allegations that he had taken money for providing match information in his early days. The money was supposed to have changed hands in 1992. The illegal bookmaker who claimed to have passed it over did not reveal the transaction until 2000, when Stewart was in the middle of England's tour to Pakistan, when match fixing was top of cricket's agenda. Stewart strenuously denied the charge, and while he easily survived, it shook him severely. "It was the original guilty until proved innocent. It was a tough six weeks." Last winter, he declared himself unavailable for the trip to India. The selectors seized the oppor-tunity to pick a 20-year-old wicketkeeper-batsman, and Nasser Hussain eventually went on public record as saying: "James Foster's our wicketkeeper now." That was that, surely, for Stewart.

So it might have been but for two things. Stewart refused to go quietly and opened the season with scores of 99 and 98. ("I'd have liked a hundred but 99 was better publicity.") Shortly after, Foster broke an arm while batting.

However much longer he stays around now, there is small likelihood that any set of team-mates, past, present, future, will get to know the real Stewart any more than they knew the real Queen Mother. In his recent autobiography, Michael Atherton wrote: "In 12 years of playing together I can scarcely recall us eating out together, on our own, once." Perhaps that was because, as Atherton observed, they are opposites in character, temperament and style. But Stewart conceded that he might be an elusive figure.

"Possibly," he said. "I keep my emotions in check. I do have good friends and team- mates in cricket and outside, but whether it's just me not naturally showing much outwardly I don't know." Certainly he retains a curiously mixed stance on the game. It is his passion and therefore to be enjoyed, but equally it is his job, and to be taken "very, very seriously".

There is no doubt that he knows his own worth and his own place, and though he hardly embraces his sobriquet, The Gaffer, it somehow fits. There is a softer man trying to get out: many of the proceeds from his testimonial next year will be going to a children's charity. But it is the steely competitiveness which is his trademark. Sometimes he has sailed close to the edge of reasonable behaviour ("but I know the difference between dissent and disappointment") and he likes to indicate he plays the Australian way.

Stewart, the elder statesman, might feel that he has been misunderstood. He is expressly reluctant to dwell on might-have-beens, but a few things still get the Stewart goat, like the way England used his services for years. "There was never a set policy. I'd get asked to keep in the last match of a series when we had to win it or something. But in trying to plug one gap we may have weakened a strength, like my partnership with Mike Atherton. But we'll never know the answer to how good an opening batsman I could have been. Geoff Boycott said I could have been one of the best. But there are two ways of looking at it. At times, keeping has helped me to stay in the side."

It has definitely prolonged his career. Nonetheless, the statistics are revealing. Stewart's overall average for England in 122 matches is 39.99. He has played 38 times as an opening batsman alone, when his average is 45.98. In the 71 matches he has kept wicket his batting average is 35.05. Worryingly (though he isn't), his figure in 29 games against Australia is 29. The better news is that in the seven Tests since his return he is averaging 56.25.

"Since it was all settled that I would keep wicket and bat in the middle order four years ago I feel much better," he said. In this series he should overtake Godfrey Evans' 219 wicketkeeping dismissals to be second on the England list to his boyhood hero, Alan Knott.

The captaincy provides another subject for mild grievance. He has led England in 14 Test matches. After the underachievement in the 1999 World Cup which followed an Ashes defeat he was sacked. "I was disappointed with the way it was handled. The Test captaincy was affected by one-day results but I accepted it. I have feelings, but why mope? What do you gain from that if you want a future? Nasser's doing a fantastic job."

He feels his decision not to tour India last winter was misunderstood. He needed an operation on his elbows, which was not made clear at the time, and he wanted to spend time with his family. It is known, because Atherton says so in his book, that he had a huge row about it in The Oval dressing room with Hussain and the England coach, Duncan Fletcher.

But he wants to look forward. Sure, England can win. They have to stay positive, and after six failures he still is. "Until it's impossible you're always capable," he said. And if the impossible happens Our Alec might one day be Our Sir Alec.

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